Wednesday, 26 September 2007

An Australian Sydney based company, DIY SEO Live has recently released a SEO tool package. The package includes a set of SEO tools, which generates comprehensive SEO Reports to evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO activities. There are 3 type of reports included in the package:

SEO Analysis

The SEO Analysis report will help you to evaluate your website's SEO Friendliness. The report includes a wide range of valuable information such as broken links, missing META tags, or Title tags. The SEO Analysis tool also provides details on hard-to-reach pages and incorrectly displayed images.SEO Links

The SEO Links tool will give you all the information you need to measure your website link popularity. The tool identifies how many websites are linking to you and which websites are linking to your competitors. The information provided is essential for developing and maintaining your link popularity and increasing your website search engine rankings. Based on the results you will be able to improve your link building strategy.

SEO Reports

DIY SEO Live also provides a powerful SEO Ranking reporting tool. This tool will monitor your website search engines rankings for your targeted keywords. This tool also provides historical ranking reports so that you can easily evaluate the effectiveness of your SEO strategy.

As an Australian SEO professional, I really welcome this new SEO tool. DIY SEO Live is really powerful. It provides everything you need to analyse a website and therefore will save a lot of time on any SEO projects. I am also glad to mention that this tool is correctly priced for freelance consultants and small businesses. With the current discount you can get full access to this tool for $49.

Tuesday, 25 September 2007

The first Australian Blogging Conference will be held on 28th of September (this Friday) at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane.

The Australian Blogging Conference 2007 is inspired by David's Winer BlogCons in the US.Instead of lengthy presentations, the conference will be more discussion-based with a discussion leader as a moderator. The conference will cover many issues raised by the emergence of the blogosphere including the politics of blogging and the legal issues behind blogging. Among the speakers: many fellow researchers from the Queensland University of Technology, some politicians, lawyers and a couple of recognized bloggers.

The Australian Blogging Conference is a great initiative that contribute to promote the online industry in Australia. If you want to attend, feel free to register here

Monday, 24 September 2007

Last July, we wrote an article on the new search engines in development. One them is Powerset, which uses a technology based on natural language instead of using keywords.Powerset has been launched to an handful of people at the TechCrunch40.

If you want to be among the first to use it, visit the Powerset website and register

If you are looking for a SEO position in Australia, a new SEO jobs portal has been created by SEO Vacancies. The website has a strong focus on SEO, SEM and PPC Jobs. SEO Vacancies also serves the UK, USA and Canada.

According to one of the founder,Paul Griffiths:"The site is designed to be fresh and easy to use with plans to add RSS feeds and a forum at a later date. In the meantime jobseekers can subscribe for free, upload their CV; search and apply for vacancies; upload photos and write covering letters and even and register to receive jobs via email the moment that they are added."

So if you want to find your next SEO position in Australia or to try your luck in the UK, this is the first stop.

Monday, 17 September 2007

According to SEA experts, this new way of marketing your website seems to be the next new eldorado for SEO and advertising.

Rand Fishkin from SEOmoz has investigated the value of links from blog marketing. He interviewed a panel of search engine experts from Google, Yahoo, Ask and MSN on the topic. All agreed that paid links from blog reviews have a good impact on your rankings if they originate from a blog with relevant content. While traditional paid links can have a discounted value, links from blog reviews seems to seen as highly regarded by searche engines.

Gareth French from Search Engine Standard even compare blog marketing with directory submission. He identified that links from blog reviews are more powerful than links from directories for the following reasons:"Here’s how paid posts - by the right bloggers - actually add value over directory submissions:

1) primarily you’re getting the insight and “approval” of a blogger who already has a readership - and if you’re targeting your campaign well, you’ll be contextually relevant to their audience

2) blogs are more vertical than directories … and are more authoritative (this is an untested assumption-based claim)

3) a paid blog post is more likely than a directory submission to get linked to and passed around - whether it does or not will depend on the individual who’s getting paid

4) when one smart company gets its business together and provides paid-post distribution deals for related bloggers (like the techmeme sponsor post box) you’ll see your links spread far and wide"

Aaron Wall, the author of the famous SEO Book also recognised the benefits of paid-post marketing for SEO purposes, but he also concluded that paid-post can have a great impact on sales as the post are actually read by highly targeted people that are interested in the content. He said:"You get exposure in active channels that people trust and are paying attention to"

In a Nutshell, blog marketing or paid-post marketing is not only a great solution to increase your rankings, but it also great to reach your target audience and improve your sales.

Friday, 14 September 2007

Facebook, the social media network, which has recently created a frenzy among Australian is opening its users profiles to search engines. The 30 milions users profiles will be accessible from search engines compared to the 25 000 , which are currently available.

Facebook will join the 'open to search engines' social network group already made of MySpace, Orkut and Linkedin. Unlike MySpace and Orkut, Facebook claims to put more emphasis on user privacy protection. Facebook users will have the option to display a public profile, while some information will remain private.

Facebook has been accused of costing more than $9 Billion a year to Australian businesses due to the amount of times employees are spending on it. Facebook's SEO means that it will be even easier to find people and therefore even easier to spend more time on it... A more positive note for advertisers. Facebook's grand opening aims at targeting the masses and therefore is expected to increase the number of users. While the advertising opportunities are still limited this change is likely to make a great improvement.

Ranking high in the SERPS for the highly competitive SEO related vertical is a long and difficult process for three main reasons:

1) There is an increasing number of company/website that compete for high ranking in this vertical.2) Most competitors are SEO agencies or SEO consultants who know and are usually good at what they do.3) Even if there are thousands of SEO related websites on the internet, not many of them are willing to give links for free.

In most cases, your website is already Search Engine Friendly and optimized for the keywords you want to rank for. The next obvious step is to build a solid link popularity and especially a large number of relevant, high-quality links from credible domains.

While not all of the highest quality (all the directories are free!), the following (growing)list of free SEO focused directories, should help you to increase the quantity of relevant links to your website and hopefully have a positive impact on your rankings in this vertical.

Thursday, 6 September 2007

Have you worked across large site structures in SEO or at an agency level servicing a broad spectrum of clients?

If so Downstream Marketing offer an excellent opportunity for an SEO manager to be involved at ground level building a specialist SEO service to our growing list of Blue Chip clients.Requirements:- minimum 2/3 years SEO experience- Background in HTML, PHP, .NET, MYSQL- Excellent written skills- Good management experience

Key RequirementsThis role would suit someone with a background of website development who is already doing SEO at a high level with regard to web design. You will have good communication skills in order to communicate effective change with our clients.

BenefitsThere are excellent career prospects for the right individual. Our company already works with large Blue Chip clients servicing their SEM requirements and is looking to grow an in house team to service the growing need for their SEO requirements as well.

You will play a pivotal role in setting up processes and liaising with clients to implement them.

Our environment is a young company located in Sydney Central near Town Hall located in a modern warehouse office space.

Monday, 3 September 2007

A great option to generate quality backlinks to your website, is blog marketing. Blog marketing is pretty simple and is really similar to traditional advertising network. Blog marketing services do not offer space where you can place your ad, but they do give the advertiser the opportunity to have a blogger reviewing the advertiser's products or services. Blog marketing is more genuine than traditional advertising.

Advantages of blog marketing

Most blog marketing services offers blog post with direct links pointing to your website for $10 to $50, which is really cheap compared to directory submission.The main advantage is that you have control over the anchor texts for your links, which create amazing opportunities for SEO. As the links are embedded in text, there are obvisously seen as valuable by Google.

Another advantage, is that you can select topic realated blogs,where your review will be published. Lets say you are a travel website and want to generate more links from travel related sites, you can simply select travel blogs. Obviously Google will give more popularity to the link as they will be highly relevant to your content.

If you are a blogger, such services also offer great opportunities to monetise your blog, to find advertisers and make money

Disadvantage of Blog Marketing

As mentioned previously, blog marketing involve a blogger to translate your marketing message, and therefore some alterations of the message might occur. Working for a client, I jave noticed that the message transmitted over a set of blogs can be really different according to the blogger ability to respect editorial rules.In the same sense, blogger have control of the content and it makes it really hard to ask for content review.

In a nutshell, blog marketing is a great opportunity to generate backlinks to your website at a low cost. Blog marketing also offer the opportunity to differenciate the source of links and can therefore contribute to increase your website rankings, while creating a buzz

Aaron Wall has released a couple of useful free seo tools with the recently popular Google gadgets. Google Gadgets are XML programs that allow integrating interactive content in a web page.The SEO Google Gadgets allow you to conduct backlink check and keyword research directly from your IGoogle or even your own website.